When Bernie Sanders famously said: “Enough of those damned emails,” many thought they’d heard the death-knell of that wearisome argument. Just this week, President Obama referred to it as “all that noise,” designed to confuse new voters about Hillary’s trustworthiness. The concept of “noise” comes from cybernetics and it refers to anything that interferes with a message sent by one party to another–we laymen also know it as static. Sad to say, we are all familiar with static on our cell phones which keep us from hearing the other person’s words and messages. The static in this case, as we all know by now, are the dark references to some of Hillary’s emails. Of the emails, President Obama also noted that while Clinton, while serving as his Secretary of State, made an “honest mistake” by using a private email server, as it was now “being blown up into just some crazy thing,” which will affect new voters when they hear “all that noise.” Why now, you may ask, all of this focused static. Well,...

In so many ways this primary season is full of serious, but often amusing, ironies. Mainstream Republican regulars and elected officials might have to run for re-election on a ticket headed by a candidate they not only have distaste for, but likely one whom nearly 2/3s of the general electorate have indicated they disliked. And don’t forget that a not insignificant percentage of the voters simply check off their candidate for President, and then “pull the lever,” or vote for the same party’s nominee for all of the others offices up for election. Against this backdrop consider the only candidates who presently qualify for nomination (according to the rules, which are susceptible to change at the beginning of the party’s convention), are: Donald Trump, who has insulted almost every known minority (including disabled persons), either directly or indirectly. He has been likened by some of the world leaders to Adolph Hitler, by many others simply as an unsteady bully. 560,000 British citizens signed, and sent to Parliament, a petition...

The long heralded Super Tuesday is now behind us. It actually revealed some surprising things. First of all, on the Republican side, it showed that Donald Trump, though clearly holding a sizable lead, is neither unbeatable or the inevitable nominee. Marco Rubio finally broke through with a win in the Minnesota caucuses. Incidentally, Donald Trump, after earlier in the evening boasting how he’d never finished worse than second in any primary–did just that by finishing a well beaten third in Minnesota. Cruz prevailed in his “must win” home state of Texas, beating Donald Trump there by 17 percentage points. Marco Rubio failed to meet the minimum threshold and, given the proportional method of allocating delegates, allowed a few more delegates to slip to Trump, as well, of course, to Cruz–which is less important than Trump’s pickup, as the game now is “Stop Trump” (from reaching the magic number of 1237 delegates needed to secure the nomination).Starting on March 15, wins will go a lot further towards nomination since a number of them will...

On the Republican side, Donald Trump definitely has that elusive characteristic known as “momentum” after big wins in South Carolina and in the Nevada caucus. Lost in all of the efforts to create a “bandwagon effect,” are the facts that: 1) Trump’s margin of victory in South Carolina was less than polls taken just a week earlier indicated suggesting late voters actually split away from supporting him, and 2) The Nevada caucus reflects a small subset of a state with small numbers of voters. For example, the total number of Hispanic voters in the entrance and exit polls was only 175 souls. Yet this is widely cited as support for Trump’s claim that, despite his perceived insults to Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, Hispanics “love” him (along with every other group). The difference between Trump and the next highest candidate, from that small subset was only about 20 votes (variation depending on which poll was cited), and a majority of the Republican Hispanics voted for others than Donald Trump. A single Hispanic voter for...

We didn’t get a final call on the Democratic race until mid-morning–and then it showed no change from the last numbers given the night before– showing a slim win for Clinton. 49.8 percent to 49.6. The last two major polls, the Des Moines Iowa Poll, which completed their polling on January 26, and the Quinnipiac poll, completed on January 31, had the race close with the former giving Clinton the edge by 3 points, and the latter poll having Sanders on top by 3. Averaging them had it dead even. As expected, turnout was the key as Sanders (and Trump in the Republican caucus) attracted young people and others who normally didn’t attend the caucus. What wasn’t certain was whether they’d turn out for the caucuses. The consensus among campaign and polling professionals was that if the turnout was 150,000 or less, Hillary would win, if it reached 200,000, Sanders would win. By that reasoning the race figured to be a dead-heat at 175,000. The last turnout figure I saw was...

As we move into the deep stretch in the race for Iowa’s convention votes and close to the election in New Hampshire, candidates are pulling out all the stops. Trump continues seeding doubts as to Cruz’s eligibility to be president, and has focused personal attacks on Cruz’s nastiness, calling Cruz the most disliked Senator by his colleagues–which may well be close to the truth. Trump also got the endorsement of Tea Party favorite Sarah Palin, which was all the more pointed since she played a big part in coalescing Tea Party support for Cruz in the Texas race that made him a U.S. Senator. Trump, himself, continues to insult a variety of targets, while calling for a 45 percent tariff on goods coming from China, despite warnings that to do so would hurt our economy, produce a trade war with China, and, no doubt, lead to China retaliating with their own increased tariff on our exports to them. Trump’s absurd proposed tariff, most economists feel, would have dire consequences. It is,...